Lisa Stokes served as inspiration for one of England's most outrageous artists and then became a painter herself. So was she the muse, or was he?

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Who's to say why some images take hold of us, stirring up bottomless interest in their origins as well as in the person who created them? If we could explain this, we would have dispelled the mysterious sway of paint on canvas, cracked open "the secret of durable pigments," as Vladimir Nabokov described it at the end of Lolita. It's a conundrum, really, why one painting arouses nothing but indifference while another calls out to you, promising to answer your unasked questions.

So it was that I became taken with the vividly haunting paintings of Lisa Stokes—which in turn led me on to the discovery of the man behind her, a strange but supremely gifted artist-cum-showman named Robert Lenkiewicz who was something of a local legend in Plymouth, England, but whose national reputation as a portraitist had faded by the time of his death at the age of 60 in 2002. She was a nubile 23-year-old when the pair met, a beautiful, red-haired girl from the English countryside who studied and worked as a medical illustrator in London; he was more than twice her age, the son of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, a thrice-married man who sired a brood of children (11? 19?) and who believed in free love and a rigorous adherence to a classical style of drawing. She came to Plymouth to seek instruction—an uncharacteristically bold move for her, by her own admission. He taught her how to paint, they became lovers, and eventually she broke away from his artistic influence and began painting in an extraordinarily evocative style all her own. Was she his muse, or was he hers? And is the distinction between artist and muse ever as clear as all that? But to begin at the beginning....

It was in London, several years ago, on the rushed end of an afternoon, that I decided to take a quick look at the galleries near Brown's, the hotel where I was staying on Albemarle Street in Mayfair. After checking out two or three, I stopped at the John Martin Gallery, where I saw a number of paintings I liked by various British artists, including Gwen John, the sister of Augustus John. I somehow got to talking with the owner of the gallery and, on a whim or a hunch, he took me downstairs into the basement to show me more works from his collection. Over in the corner, a large, thickly painted canvas caught my eye, depicting a scene I didn't quite understand but immediately felt drawn to: It featured a glowing red dollhouse, with a child's face peering out from a darkened window. I went closer to study it, and several other paintings that exerted a similarly spooky spell, as though their creator had entered a private landscape of childhood secrets and hurts that I thought were known only to me—and, even more unexpectedly, had managed to inscribe these most vulnerable of emotions with every stroke of her brush. There was one, Portrait of Rose, that depicted a little girl in a green coat who looked like a windup toy or a human creature with wings, holding an old-fashioned wooden hobbyhorse; lying on the floor, as if thrown down in a fit of pique, was a miniature version of the girl. The painting suggested an inviolate world of feeling, a primal scene of sorts, which the viewer happens upon almost as a trespasser. Another large work, called The Journey, featured a girlish figure sitting on a wooden toy horse twice her size. The only illumination, against a dark brown background, came from a naked yellow bulb that also lights up a bouquet of dried flowers lying on the floor. The effect, again, is of coming upon something furtive and slightly erotic in tone, as if the child and the horse are paired in some impossible, exhaustive pursuit.

It turned out that the artist was someone named Lisa Stokes and that she had not long ago had her first solo exhibition at John Martin's Chelsea gallery (which has since closed). Martin told me that he'd learned about Stokes' work from two collectors he respected and that he'd been struck by the "exceptional power" of her paintings—"the stillness and raw energy that simmers beneath"—when he went to see them for himself. "I don't think there is any denying the quality of her work and the extraordinary sense of poetry. She works very much from her interior world and knows how to get that out. It's tough work that she does—it's not pretty or palatable for everyone. A lot of artists are scared of exposing themselves so much," he added. "We're in an era of tidy, formal art."

I left with the feeling that I'd stumbled onto a major, somewhat uncategorizable talent—partly figurative and partly expressionistic, with abstract touches—whose work was known only to a select number but whose reputation would surely grow with the passage of time. What I didn't expect was that Stokes' disturbing hide-and-seek paintings would continue to grip my imagination over the months to come—so much so that I eventually arranged a visit to Plymouth, where she continued to live after her romantic relationship with Lenkiewicz had ended, in the hope of writing a piece about her and the forces that shaped her.

You never feel you've gone dark enough," Stokes is saying. "You have to push yourself over the cliff." We're sitting in the narrow living room of the three-story Victorian she shares with her bearded and genial-seeming boyfriend, Chris, and their four-year-old daughter, Rose, on picturesque Chudleigh Road in the old port town of Plymouth. The house is very cozy, in a shabby-chic way, with unfinished wooden floors and pale mint walls. Chris, who's a yacht rigger, is leaving the next day for Marseilles, while Rose, dressed charmingly in brown-and-white tights and brown-and-red patent shoes, busies herself with a medley of toys that look like they might double as props for her mother's paintings—as do the old dolls and candles nestled on top of the sputtering fireplace across from where we sit. It's a Saturday afternoon and I've taken the train from London, where a second exhibition of Stokes' work, "Hiding Place," is up at John Martin on Albemarle Street. Plymouth has recently gone through a period of economic growth, with much gentrification of dilapidated nineteenth-century houses, but it still feels sleepy and old-fashioned.

Stokes, at 41, retains an arresting beauty that makes it easy to see why a roving-eyed connoisseur of women like Lenkiewicz (he kept notebooks of his amorous conquests, which he numbered at more than 2,000) would've been smitten. She has wild russet hair, turquoise blue cat's eyes, and a long, curvy mouth set in a heart-shaped face; her skin is poreless. As we talk, I'm struck that there is something of a wise child about her, like the all-seeing young observer in Henry James' What Maisie Knew whose core of innocence remains untouched despite all the adult corruption she's witness to.

Stokes grew up the middle of three sisters on a farm in South Devon—her father was a sheep farmer—and she says that the themes of life, death, and loss that preoccupy her now, particularly as experienced through the prism of childhood, come to her from having been around animals dying and being born. She remains close to her family, despite the fact that her parents weren't terribly supportive when she first decided to pursue painting; they wanted her to find "a proper job." Her mother is a housewife, and one of her sisters works in a bank; the other sells vintage furniture. "My childhood was very magical," Stokes recalls. "It builds your imagination to live in the middle of nowhere." She drew from an early age but, by her own account, didn't take it all that seriously. Some enduring flicker of ambition must have been ignited in her, however, because she went on to art college in Plymouth and then Bournemouth, studying graphic design and illustration. On the strength of her portfolio she got a job in London, doing black-and-white drawings for doctors at the Royal Marsden hospital; she was supposed to go into a surgical unit to sketch, but her "squeamishness" overruled this next step. Meanwhile, she realized she wanted to do her own work, and to paint rather than simply draw.

From left: Robert Lenkiewicz, The Painter With Lisa Stokes, 1993; Bouquet II and Self-Portrait Embracing, both by Stokes.

Back in Plymouth, she overcame her native shyness and took a step that would change the course of her life. Having heard tell of the 48-year-old Robert Lenkiewicz—"He was the most famous person in town," she says—and even glimpsed him on the street ("I saw him buying paints, and I hid. He seemed enigmatic and mysterious and scary"), Stokes went and knocked on his door. "I wonder," she asked, "if you could teach me to paint nudes?" He laughed, she says, and told her to set up an appointment. Lenkiewicz, a first-rate draftsman himself, believed that you could teach anyone to paint, and he was willing to give his time, without charge, to a student as serious as Stokes appeared to be—and who was lovely to look at, to boot. She started studying with him once a week—"I was being taught disciplined, academic painting"—and between lessons took work home to the apartment in Plymouth she shared with her older sister.

So far, so ordinary. Then at some point the relationship between teacher and pupil shifted, with Stokes offering to pose nude—ostensibly to pay Lenkiewicz back. "I quite fancied being painted," she explains, sounding a bit mischievous. "I went to the studio virtually every day. I was one of his main models." For her first painting, she sat topless, on his lap; he painted from their mirrored image. The two of them began keeping separate journals about the process of falling in love; Lenkiewicz thought of the women he was involved with as "projects" and was in the habit of keeping notebooks in which he recorded the daily tug and flow of emotions and also drew erotic sketches. "I was one of his muses," Stokes declares—and then, just as I'm sliding Lenkiewicz into the "lover/father figure" slot, she amends the thought: "When I painted, Robert was my muse. On lots of paintings he did of me, he wrote, `Lisa Stokes, Painter,' on the back, just to make sure people understood what I did."

It's next to impossible, listening to Stokes recount their seven-year affair (they knew each other 12 years in all)—which she describes as having ultimately "drained the life out of me"—to ascertain who was the more active party and who the more acted upon. She was known as one of his harem when they walked down the street together, which gave her a certain status; all the same, she constantly compared herself to other women, since anyone who walked into the studio was fair game for Robert's attentions. "He collected everything, from books to people. It was a kind of greed, really," she says. They parted ways when she met Chris and decided that she'd had enough of "that kind of consuming relationship. At the end, I was very stressed out, thin as a wraith. I met somebody I was really attracted to who came as light relief. But it wasn't an easy decision to go."

Although our usual tendency is to demonize one of the characters in mentor/muse situations—usually the male (as in the case of Rodin and Camille Claudel)—while viewing the other as the victim, the truth is often more subtle. Certainly Lenkiewicz's controversial reputation as an artist (he painted death scenes and orgasms, among other loaded subjects) and relentless womanizer preceded him, and Stokes was fully aware of these aspects when she got in touch with him. "I got ridiculed by my friends for going down to the Barbican, an old fishing area of Plymouth where Robert had his studio and house." He was an overtly eccentric man, after all, given to wearing his gray hair longand flowing together with his beard, and dressing in 10-league boots and a velvet smock—at least as known for his sensational lifestyle, which included embalming a dead tramp's corpse in his house, as for his artistic output. (Stokes remembers him as "very dismissive" of his own work; he called himself "the best bad painter I know.") Whatever
the potential danger—"I was kind of frightened of him," Stokes says. "Robert was like a vampire; he smelled of sex"—there was something Stokes wanted from him that made the risk worth taking. "He was a brilliant teacher," she says. "He made you feel very interesting. He loved women, I'm sure of that." She goes on: "He gave me self-belief. He was the first person who said, `You can do this.' You really need someone like that." Lenkiewicz, for his part, presumably wanted something out of her: a new adoring female to obsess over and nurture, someone who appreciated all he had to impart in the way of artistic ideas and general learning. (Lenkiewicz was an omnivorous reader, notwithstanding his hatred of anything intellectual, and was interested in all types of art, from Michelangelo to Jasper Johns.)

Stokes initially painted in the traditional style championed by Lenkiewicz but eventually came to feel too restricted by its emphasis on verisimilitude and, as she describes it, "broke away" into what Lenkiewicz called "private language" paintings. "I had more I wanted to say," she recalls. "I started experimenting." Lenkiewicz, in turn, didn't mind that she diverged from his teachings; on the contrary, he exhibited some of her work in his own gallery. "He wasn't prescriptive," she notes. "He encouraged people to go in their own direction."

These days Lisa Stokes follows her singular, elusive vision, drawing on what haunts her. "My head is like a box of frogs: You end up getting bombarded with ideas," she says, adding, "I don't paint from life. I paint from my imagination, things that show pain. I try to wear my heart on my sleeve but then try to hide it. I want people to know, then I don't." When I ask the source of her pain, she answers simply: "I don't know, it's just in me. Life does it to you." She goes on to say that she finds dramatic, melancholy themes more powerful than painting beautiful sunsets. "I paint about the loss of things—of a child [she's had a miscarriage], of childhood, of a relationship. The physical and emotional experiences that come in the wake of something being destroyed, forgotten, or hidden. I find it quite moving."

She paints steadily from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., the hours Rose is at school. Although she was a "workaholic" before having a child, she thinks motherhood has enhanced her work, allowed her to see the world in a more "creative" way. She likes building up the paint on the canvas and wears rubber gloves to minimize the mess. Her work often includes see-through items, whether it be a child's anorak or a drawstring bag. She gets her dribbled, streaky effect by mixing paint with linseed oil. "I like stains," she says, "the memory of things, the ghosts of other paintings coming through, so you're not quite sure what you see."

Although I've seen Stokes two more times since our first meeting, I decide to catch up with her on the phone near the end of September. It's going on ten o'clock at night, her time, and I hear Rose—now eight—chatting happily in the background. Stokes and Chris have parted ways, although they vacationed together last summer in France. "You get used to being on your own," she says, but then adds thoughtfully: "I'd love to fall in love again, but I seem to be drawn to the wrong people. I don't like being alone, really." I ask how she looks back on her relationship with Lenkiewicz, whether she sees herself as having been "used" by him. "You're always a victim at some point," she answers in her die-hard-honest, even-keeled way. "You're never equal—there's always someone more dominant than the other, sometimes in a good way." While she frequently felt jealous of the other women he saw while they were involved, "I wouldn't have wanted him all to myself," she says. "I wouldn't have been able to handle him. He liked to play games with you; there'd be nothing left."

Stokes says she's excited about what she's doing these days, which is making paintings about her breakup with Chris. Although she hates deadlines, she's working toward another show and would love to find a gallery in New York. Her best time for painting is still the morning, "when the ideas flow," and she's still obsessed with "finding beauty in things that are damaged or breaking," as she once told me, continuing to deploy her language of dolls, daisy
chains, dying flowers, dead animals, doors, birds, bruises, and wounds to express this contradiction. There's been a slight change in how she puts paint on canvas, she observes; she's trying to convey emotions with thinly as well as thickly painted areas. Even all these years later, Lenkiewicz often comes to mind when she works. "He completely changed the way I thought," she says. "He gave me courage to do what I wanted to do. I can't thank him enough for that." As for the paintings themselves, she prefers not to analyze them other than to say that they're a way of exorcising her feelings. "I'm quite a modest person," she says, "but I want the paintings to scream, to stop people in their tracks."